UN to Visit N. Korea Nuclear Site

Published 8:00 pm, Sunday, January 6, 2002

A team of international experts from the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency plans to visit a nuclear facility in North Korea next week.

Three inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency are to visit nuclear facilities in the Nyongbyon area from Jan. 15 to 19, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Monday.

It will be the first official visit by agency representatives at the complex's isotope production laboratory, which is used to produce nuclear materials for medical and industrial purposes.

"This is a visit, not an inspection," Fleming said, noting the agency has other officials who are permanently based at the site.

North Korea was a member of the IAEA until 1994, when it pulled out. Since then, it has been under pressure to resume normal relations with the group.

Fleming described North Korea's decision to allow the international experts to visit as a gesture to the IAEA toward normalizing relations.

North Korea's nuclear program has been a source of tension with the United States, which fears the politically isolated communist country may have diverted nuclear materials from peaceful purposes into weapons production.

North Korea froze its suspected nuclear weapons program under an agreement with the United States in 1994, but U.S. officials suspect that it might have amassed enough plutonium to make one or two atomic bombs before shutting its Soviet-style reactors.

In return for the 1994 freeze, a U.S.-led international consortium is building two safer nuclear reactors in North Korea.